The Mozilla team is making progress on the next generation of Firefox but it may not be ready for prime time until the holiday season.

Firefox 4 Beta 6 was released on September 14. Beta 7, which is currently under development, is slated for release sometime in the second half of September and the first release candidate is expected to be delivered in the second half of October.

These dates are very tentative. Based on the discussion at the group's weekly meeting Tuesday, much work needs to be done before the next beta is released. There are currently 51 blockers that need to be fixed before beta 7 ships, and a total number of 758 blockers identified in the code.

This is an ambitious release for the Mozilla team and much of the planned features -- such as TabCandy and enhanced Win/Mac/Linux themes -- are built. However, the code may not be feature complete until Beta 8. Based on the meeting notes posted yesterday, JavaScript performance is strong vis-a-vis Chrome 5 but TabCandy is still performing slowly.

Firefox 4 will go up against Google's Chrome 5 and Microsoft's IE9. The last major upgrade of Firefox, version 3.5, was released in June of 2009.

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